Directly detecting sub-GeV dark matter with electrons from nuclear scattering

Dark matter (DM) particles with mass in the sub-GeV range are an attractive alternative to heavier weakly-interacting massive particles, but direct detection of such light particles is challenging. If however DM-nucleus scattering leads to ionisation of the recoiling atom, the resulting electron may be detected even if the nuclear recoil is unobservable. We demonstrate that including this effect significantly enhances direct detection sensitivity to sub-GeV DM. Existing experiments set world-leading limits, and future experiments may probe the cross sections relevant for thermal freeze-out.Comment: 8 pages revtex4, 5 figures; v2: analysis updated to include constraints from XENON1T; accepted for publication in PR

A weighty interpretation of the Galactic Centre excess

Previous attempts at explaining the gamma-ray excess near the Galactic Centre have focussed on dark matter annihilation directly into Standard Model particles. This results in a preferred dark matter mass of 30-40 GeV (if the annihilation is into b quarks) or 10 GeV (if it is into leptons). Here we show that the gamma-ray excess is also consistent with heavier dark matter particles; in models of secluded dark matter, dark matter with mass up to 76 GeV provides a good fit to the data. This occurs if the dark matter first annihilates to an on-shell particle that subsequently decays to Standard Model particles through a portal interaction. This is a generic process that works in models with annihilation, semi-annihilation or both. We explicitly demonstrate this in a model of hidden vector dark matter with an SU(2) gauge group in the hidden sector.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. v2: Matches PRD version. Note: title of PRD version is "Interpretation of the Galactic Center excess of gamma rays with heavier dark matter particles

Transplanckian Censorship and Global Cosmic Strings

Large field excursions are required in a number of axion models of inflation. These models also possess global cosmic strings, around which the axion follows a path mirroring the inflationary trajectory. Cosmic strings are thus an interesting theoretical laboratory for the study of transplanckian field excursions. We describe connections between various effective field theory models of axion monodromy and study the classical spacetimes around their supercritical cosmic strings. For small decay constants $f<M_p$ and large winding numbers $n>M_p/f$, the EFT is under control and the string cores undergo topological inflation, which may be either of exponential or power-law type. We show that the exterior spacetime is nonsingular and equivalent to a decompactifying cigar geometry, with the radion rolling in a potential generated by axion flux. Signals are able to circumnavigate infinite straight strings in finite but exponentially long time, $t\sim e^{\Delta a/M_p}$. For finite loops of supercritical string in asymptotically flat space, we argue that if topological inflation occurs, then topological censorship implies transplanckian censorship, or that external observers are forbidden from threading the loop and observing the full excursion of the axion.Comment: v2: refs added, fig 6 extended. published in JHEP. 28 pages, 7 figure

Hadron Collider Sensitivity to Fat Flavourful Z′Z^\primes for RK(∗)R_{K^{(\ast)}}

We further investigate the case where new physics in the form of a massive $Z^\prime$ particle explains apparent measurements of lepton flavour non-universality in $B \rightarrow K^{(\ast)} l^+ l^-$ decays. Hadron collider sensitivities for direct production of such $Z^\prime$s have been previously studied in the narrow width limit for a $\mu^+ \mu^-$ final state. Here, we extend the analysis to sizeable decay widths and improve the sensitivity estimate for the narrow width case. We estimate the sensitivities of the high luminosity 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), a high energy 27 TeV LHC (HE-LHC), as well as a potential 100 TeV future circular collider (FCC). The HL-LHC has sensitivity to narrow $Z^\prime$ resonances consistent with the anomalies. In one of our simplified models the FCC could probe 23 TeV $Z^\prime$ particles with widths of up to 0.35 of their mass at 95\% confidence level (CL). In another model, the HL-LHC and HE-LHC cover sizeable portions of parameter space, but the whole of perturbative parameter space can be covered by the FCC.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures; v2 Reference

F-theory GUTs with U(1) Symmetries: Generalities and Survey

We study the structure of SU(5) F-theory GUT models that engineer additional U(1) symmetries. These are highly constrained by a set of relations observed by Dudas and Palti (DP) that originate from the physics of 4D anomaly cancellation. Using the DP relations, we find a general tension between unification and the suppression of dimension 5 proton decay when one or more U(1)'s are PQ symmetries and hypercharge flux is used to break the SU(5) GUT group. We then specialize to spectral cover models, whose global completions in F- theory we know how to construct. In that setting, we provide a technical derivation of the DP relations, construct spectral covers that yield all possible solutions to them, and provide a complete survey of spectral cover models for SU(5) GUTs that exhibit two U(1) symmetries.Comment: 27 pages plus 5 appendices (70 pages total) ; v2 references adde

hhjjhhjj production at the LHC

The search for di-Higgs production at the LHC in order to set limits on Higgs trilinear coupling and constraints on new physics is one of the main motivations for the LHC high luminosity phase. Recent experimental analyses suggest that such analyses will only be successful if information from a range of channels is included. We therefore investigate di-Higgs production in association with two hadronic jets and give a detailed discussion of both the gluon- and weak boson fusion contributions, with a particular emphasis on the phenomenology with modified Higgs trilinear and quartic gauge couplings. We perform a detailed investigation of the full hadronic final state and find that $hhjj$ production should add sensitivity to a di-Higgs search combination at the HL-LHC with 3 ab$^{-1}$. Since the WBF and GF contributions are sensitive to different sources of physics beyond the Standard Model, we devise search strategies to disentangle and isolate these production modes. While gluon fusion remains non-negligible in WBF-type selections, sizeable new physics contributions to the latter can still be constrained. As an example of the latter point we investigate the sensitivity that can be obtained for a measurement of the quartic Higgs-gauge boson couplings.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

TopicFlow: Disentangling quark and gluon jets with normalizing flows

The isolation of pure samples of quark and gluon jets is of key interest at hadron colliders. Recent work has employed topic modeling to disentangle the underlying distributions in mixed samples obtained from experiments. However, current implementations do not scale to high-dimensional observables as they rely on binning the data. In this work we introduce TopicFlow, a method based on normalizing flows to learn quark and gluon jet topic distributions from mixed datasets. These networks are as performant as the histogram-based approach, but since they are unbinned, they are efficient even in high dimension. The models can also be oversampled to alleviate the statistical limitations of histograms. As an example use case, we demonstrate how our models can improve the calibration accuracy of a classifier. Finally, we discuss how the flow likelihoods can be used to perform outlier-robust quark/gluon classification.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. v2: Added footnote in Section III B. Added baseline and related discussion to Section III C. v3: Match published versio